I'm Thomas D. Greer, a professional developer and consultant. I work primarily in the financial and transactional printing industry (think "credit card statements" or "personalized private investment reports"). I found this site while researching a long-standing question I have about vBulletin template/plugin variable scope.

I've been doing web development since the web's inception, and prior to that was very active on Compuserve, acting as a sysop for their LitForum and its offshoot, Poetry Workshop. I'm a published poet, and work primarily in Westernized versions of Japanese genre poetry. I'm currently in a "writing hiatus" while I concentrate on other interests, but still do work for some school textbook publishers.

I found vBulletin by participating on www.daniweb.com, where I'm on the writing staff, and moderate some of the programming sections.

I write my own plugins, more or less. My favorite: go to MSN and search for "PostScript Variable Data Printing". I'm the first result, click it and scroll to the bottom. I've coded a custom "invite" block which uses the search engine and search terms in its message. Nifty, huh?

Hello Thomas, welcome to the site!

You've certainly done some interesting work there!

Damn, Compuserve.. that was my first gateway to the internet back in '85. The 'ole BB scene was a little different back then to say the least.

Nice to meet you TG.

One of my first programming projects was a full-fledged modem/dialer interface to Compuserve's CB/Chat. One of the things you could do was play 5-card draw poker. The client would send/intercept specially coded "chat" strings to communicate the deal/cards/bets etc. to the other players. Any other strings filtered through as normal chat. It was fun, except for the part where I meticulously played Solitaire over and over until I had a screen-shot of every single card!

If I had only patented "online broadcast network poker", think of where I'd be today.

Yea, I remember using Compuserve with my 386pc. :p Great article, and glad to have you aboard the site. I like how there is a message saying I used MSN as the search to reach that post. Was that released on vBulletin.org?

Hope to see you around the boards.

No, it wasn't; I wrote that myself. Right now I'm a little irritated with .org. As to why I haven't released any plugins to the public, I explain that on one of your "sister sites": Should I release my plugins/hacks?

That's quite an interesting read.

The only reason why I release my work at vB.org is so I can add a link to vbhackers.com (and possibly a future site of mine? who knows :p), heh.

Thanks, and I understand what you mean about keeping your hacks private. I do with alot of my code now. Especially if the hack/plugin is custom for this board.

1) If I supply my custom code I use here then that opens up new level of competition for me with new boards, and like you said... the code here is for my site, not 500 others with diffrent settings. :p

That's very true.

The only reason why people release those kind of unique hacks are either:
1. Because they shut down their board
2. Because a new major version of vB is released, thus making the old version of the hack pretty much redundant
3. If the site is in money problems it might sell the Skin/Hack/whatever to a number of people who are interested in this.

For example: the hack install system. One of the most unique hacks (this site and vb.org are the only sites who have this afaik) around. It's only been released twice, once by some French guy, he released it because he shut down his site (his hack didn't even work btw), and the other by a member of our forums here (Mad_Max) very near to the release of 3.5.x.

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